Search

Across the world, national currencies—public goods that emerged out of a previous era of currency proliferation—are now competing with private alternatives. As paper and coins fall into disuse, the seigniorage that helps to fund the circulation and regulation of currency diminishes, while their capacity to bind together states and citizens decreases in equal measure. The Swedish central bank's response to these threats, which includes issuing the world's first national digital currency, charts a course that all central banks must consider in the near future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jayathi Ghosh's paper explores the relationship between social inequality and economic outcomes. She argues that social and relational inequalities contribute to work distribution, labor segmentation, and differential remuneration in both formal and informal labor markets. Ghosh challenges the assumption that free trade benefits both parties equally, suggesting that exchange can be extractive and favor one party over another. Her findings align with research in anthropology and feminist anthropology, which also highlight the ways in which social differences are sustained and leveraged by exchange. Ghosh's work opens up avenues for interdisciplinary collaboration and discussion on addressing social inequality. [Extracted from the article]

A Community of Europeans? Transnational Identities and Public Spheres by Thomas Risse. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2010. 272 pp. Paper, $24.95. In a comprehensive account of the past 20 [...]

In the decade since the 2008 global financial crisis, much of the debate has been over whom to blame: reckless speculative finance or irresponsible (often low-income) borrowers. This essay takes up this set of moral arguments about what the poor can and should be able to afford by examining subprime logics at a global scale: subprime empire. Predatory lending in heartland America and development-oriented microcredit in places such as India and Paraguay appear not just to be geographically disparate but also to have different moral valences. After closer inspection, however, we argue that subprime lending and microfinance are two sides of the same coin. Our analysis of microfinance allows us to understand what is happening in the "in-between" as capital flows between financial investors and poor borrowers. By comparing financialization in India and Paraguay, we document and theorize the making of subprime empires that rely on actors within marginal financial sites to stabilize the evaluative frameworks and social interdependencies that make profits flow. We argue that the forms of financial capture and conversion in the "financial in-between" reproduce imperial dynamics by naturalizing the limited expectations of economic subjects of the global south and erasing the violence inherent in these forms of economic redistribution that maintain those expectations as such. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]